[This
is one (abridged ver.) of two essays written by CLR James at the request of George
Lamming for the independence issue (1966) of the journal, New World.

According
to James,“I take Kanhai as the high peak
of West Indian cricketing development. West Indian cricketing had reached
such a stage, that a fine cricketer could be adventuresome, and Kanhai
was adventuresome…People felt that it was more than a mere description
of how he batted; it was something characteristic of us as cricketers.
They felt that it was not only a cricketing question, because Kanhai was
an East Indian, and East Indians were still somewhat looked down upon
by other people in the Caribbean. But I stated that here was a cricketer
who was doing things that nobody else was doing, and I was very pleased
when he became the captain of the West Indies side.”

]

Writing critically about West Indian
cricket and cricketers, or any cricket for that matter, is a difficult
discipline. The investigation, the analysis, even the casual historical
or sociological gossip about and great cricketer should deal with actual
cricket, the way he bats or bowls or fields, does all or any of these.
You may wander far from where you started, but unless you have your eyes
constantly on the ball, in fact never take your eyes off it, you are soon
not writing about cricket, but yourself (or other people) and psychological
or literary responses to the game. This can be and has been done quite
brilliantly, adding a little something to literature but practically nothing
to cricket, as little as the story of Jack and the Beanstalk (a great
tale) adds to our knowledge of agriculture. This
is particularly relevant to the West Indies.

A great West Indies cricketer in
his play should embody some essence of that crowded vagueness which passes for
the history of the West Indies. If, like Kanhai, he is one of the most remarkable
and individual of contemporary batsmen, then that should not make him less but
more West Indian. You see what you are looking for, and in Kanhai’s batting what
I have found is a unique pointer of the West Indian quest for identity, for ways
of expressing our potential bursting at every seam. So now I hope we understand
each other. Eyes on the ball.

The
first historical innings (I prefer to call them historical now) by Kanhai was
less than 50, for British Guiana against the Australians of 1956. Kanhai had nor
yet made the West Indies team. He played well but what was remarkable about the
innings was not only its promise but that he was the junior in a partnership with
Clyde Walcott as senior.

Kanhai played effective innings,
which resulted in his being selected for the 1957 West Indies tour in
England. I am not making a chronicle. I remember, however, the batting
that he showed in all Tests in England. West Indies was scrambling for
openers and much of the responsibility was thrown to Kanhai. He bore it
without disgrace, with spasms of alternate toughness and brilliance which
only later we were to learn were fundamental constituents in his character.

Yet the innings in 1957 that future
events caused me to remember most strongly was his last ten innings at
the Oval. He faced Trueman and immediately hit him for two uninhabited
fours. Gone was the restrain that held him prisoner during all of the
previous innings against England.

Kanhai, I know now, had made up
his mind to have a final fling at the English bowlers. But either he wasn’t yet
good enough to play such cricket in a Test or he had not shaken off the effects
of months of restrain. He was out almost at once…The next innings that helped
to build the Kanhai personality was played as far away as Australia. It was an
innings of over two hundred made in one day. Kanhai simply went to the Melbourne
wicket and from the first ball hit the Victorian bowlers all over the place until
he was tired at the end of the day.

In Australia, Frank Worrell made
West Indians and the world aware of what West Indians were capable of when their
talents had full play. That is Worrell’s gift to the West Indian personality…Knahai
continued to play that way all through the season. When he made a century in each
innings against Australia, he was within an ace of making the second century in
even time. Hunte being run out in an effort to help Kanhai towards the century,
Kanhai was so upset that it was long minutes before he could make the necessary
runs.

Kanhai continued to score, in the
West Indies, in India, in Pakistan, but the next great landmark of his career
was his innings against England at the Oval in 1963…at the Oval, with the fat
of the match depending to a substantial degree on his batting (Sobers ran himself
out) in this his last test Innings in England, Kanhai set off to do to the English
what he had done to the Australians.

Perhaps I should have seen its
national significance, its relation to our quest for national identity. Here was
a West Indians provng to himself that there was one field in which the West Indian
not only was second to none, but was the creator of its own destiny. However,
swept away by the brilliance and its dramatic circumstances, I floated with the
stream.

1964 was a great year…all through
1964 I sat in press boxes, most often between Sir Learie Constantine and
Sir Frank Worrell. We were reporting England against Australia; there
was a lot of talking about cricket and naturally about awest Indian cricketers.
About Kanhai, for quite a while the only thing notable said was by Worrell.
He made a comparison between Kanhai and Everton Weekes as batsmen who
would stand back and lash the length ball away on the off-side or to the
on-boundary. Then at Leeds, Kanhai himself turned up and came and sat
in the press box. Learie had a long look at him and then turned to me
and said, “There is Kanhai.
You know at times he goes crazy.”

I knew that Learie had something
in mind.I waited and before long I learnt what it was. I shall try as
far as I can to put it in his own words. “Some
batsmen play brilliantly sometimes and at ordinary times they go ahead
as usual. That one,"nodding at Kanhai,
“ is different from all of them. On certain days, before he goes into
the wicket, he makes up his mind to let them have it. And once he is that
way nothing on earth can stop him. Some of his colleagues in the pavilion
who have played with him for years have seen strokes that they have never
seen before: from him or anybody else. He carries on that way for 60 or
70 or 100 and then he comes back with a great innings behind him.”

That
was illuminating indeed, coming from someone who knew all about batting
which aimed at hitting bowlers all over the place. It was obvious that
at times, Kanhai’s audacity at the wicket had earned not the usual perfunctory
admiration but the deep and indeed awesome respect of Constantine. We
were both thinking of the 1963 innings at the Oval. He had hit the English
bowlers all over the place, he gave no chance and never looked like getting
out. Yet I knew that Learie was aware of something in Kanhai’s batting
that had escaped me. At off times I wondered what it might be.

Going crazy. That could
be Greek Dionysius, the satiric passion for the expression of the natural
man, bursting through the acquired restraints of disciplined necessity.
I played with the idea for a while. Tentatively. I settled for the West
Indian proving to himself that henceforth he would follow no established
pattern but would create his own.

Certainty
came in the 1964 season. Sir Frank Worrell led a team of west Indian players
against England eleven at Scarborough and Edgbaston (a third game a Lord’s
was rained out). Kanhai made a century in each, and what I saw, no one
has written about: nor have I met anyone who appears to have noticed it.

At Scarborough, Kanhai
was testing out something new.Anyone could see that he was trying to sweep anything near the leg
stump round to fine-leg to beat both deep square and long-leg. He missed
the ball more than he connected. That was easy enough. But I distinctly
remember being vaguely aware that he was feeling his way to something.
I attributed it to the fact that he was playing league cricket all season
and this was his first first-class match. Afterwards, I was to recall
his careful defense of immaculate length balls from Trevor Bailey, and,
without any warning or fuss, not even a notable follow-through, he took
on the rise and lifted it ten feet over mid-on’s head to beat wide long-on
to the boundary; he never budged from his crease, he barely swung at the
ball. Yet, as far as he was concerned, it was four predestined.

We
went to Edgbaston. Bailey’s side had six bowlers who had bowled for England
that season. If the wicket was not unresponsive to spin, and the atmosphere
not unresponsive to swing, the rise of the ball from the pitch was fairly
regular. Kanhai began by giving notice that he expected test bowlers to
bowl at length; balls a trifle loose so rapidly and unerringly paid the
full penalty that by the time he had made 30 or 40 everyone was on his
best behaviour.

Kanhai did not go crazy.
Exactly the reverse. He discovered, created a new dimension in batting.The only name I can give to it is “cat-and-mouse.” The bowler
would bowl a length ball. Kanhai would play a defensive stroke, preferably
off the front foot, pushing the ball for one, quite often for two on the
on-side—a most difficult stroke on an uncertain pitch, demanding precious
footwork and clockwork timing. The bowler, after seeing his best lengths,
exploited in this manner, would shift, whereupon he was unfailingly dispatched
to the boundary. After a time it began to look as if the whole sequence
had been pre-arranged for the benefit of the spectators. Kanhai did not
confine himself too rigidly to this pre-established harmony.

One bowler, to escape the remorseless
billiard-like pushes, brought the ball untimely up. Kanhai hit him for six to
the long-on off the front foot. The bowler shortened a bit. Kanhai in the same
over hit him for six in the same place, off the back foot this time. Dexter, who
made a brilliant, in fact, dazzling century in the traditional style, hit a ball
out of the ground over the wide mid-on. Kanhai hit one out of the ground some
40 yards further on that Dexter. He made over 170 in about three hours.

Next day, Brian Johnson in the
Daily Mail, Crawford White in the Daily Express, John Woodcock in
The Times—three men who have watched critically all the great players of
the last thirty years—made no effort to contain themselves: they had never seen
such batting. Here and there some showed that in their minds the Everest conquered
by Bradman had been once again scaled.

They were wrong. Kanhai
had found his way into regions Bradman never knew. It was not only the
technical skill and strategic generalship that made the innings the most
noteworthy I have seen. There was more to it, to be seen as well as felt.
Bradman was a ruthless executioner of bowlers. All through this demanding
innings Kanhai grinned with a grin that could be seen a mile away.

Now to fit his cricket into the
history of the West Indies. I saw all his batting against the Australians during
their tour of the West Indies in 1965. Some fine play, but nothing in the same
category at Edgbaston. At Melbourne in Australia, he had experienced a freedom
in which his technique could explore roads historically charted, but to him unknown.
He had to wait until the last test in England in 1963 to assure himself that his
conquest of Australia was not an accident.

Now in 1964 at Scarborough and
Edgbaston he was again free; to create not only “a house for Mr. Biswas,” a house
like other houses, but to sail the seas that opn out before the East Indians who
no longer has to prove himself to anybody or to himself. It was no longer: anything
you can do, I can do better. That had been
left at Kennington Oval in 1963. Now it was fresh fields and pastures new, not
tomorrow but today.

At that moment,
Edgbaston in 1963, the West Indian could strike from his feet the dust of centuries.
The match did not impose any burdensome weight of responsibility. He was free
as few West Indians have been free.

Cricket is an
art, a means of national expression. Voltaire says that no one is so boring as
the man who insists on saying everything. I have said enough…But I believe I owe
it to the many who did not see the Edgbaston innings to say what I thought it
showed of the directions that, once freed, the West Indian might take. The West
Indian in my view embody more sharply than elsewhere Nietzsche’s conflict between
the ebullience of Dionysius and the discipline of Apollo. Kanhai’s going crazy
might seem to be Dionysius in us breaking loose…maybe I saw only what I was looking
for. Maybe.

Rohan Kanhai's debut for West Indies in 1957 was as an opening batsman
(and wicket keeper!). However, in the following year, on Everton Weekes' retirement,
he settled comfortably into the number three spot. In the 3rd Test against India
he made his maiden century, going on to score 256, at that time the highest test
score ever recorded in India. He had an exhilarating style and for a short time
was Captain of the West Indies. Test Statistics:
Inns NO Runs
HS Avg 100s 50s Ct
St